WG EU fail: T-Mobile false gold promotion

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Source: Glos Wielkopolski news portal

Hello everyone,

it is not often that WG EU fails make it past the forums, but when they do, it’s usually something special. In this case, it concerns the Polish community. Today, on Glos Wielkopolski news portal, an article came out about the following event. I will try to translate from Polish (a mixture of google translate and the fact that I am Slavic and Czech isn’t that far from Polish, but feel free to correct any mistranslations).

The article by Krzysztof M. Kaźmierczak is called “World of Tanks: Financial scandal in popular tank game?”

“Polish fans of the record-breaking game “World of Tanks” feel cheated by a promotional gold (virtual currency) sale offer. This is the first dispute over consumer rights in the history of the game. Some users already have filed a complaint to Polish consumer-protection authorities and legal lawsuits are predicted. The game producer denies all complaints and one of the players, who took legal steps already, was already punished.”

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Russians rage on IS-4 video

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Hello everyone,

It’s not every day that something pisses the Russian community off, but looks like The_Chieftain made that happen with his latest IS-4 video:

 

 

To be clear – it’s a great video, as usual with Chieftain’s Hatch. I really like the series and it’s nice to see some of the more exotic Kubinka tanks this way.

Strangely enough, Russians started moaning as hell – both in youtube comments (of the Russian video version). They didn’t The_Chieftain saying like that the IS-4 was in real life a bad tank and that some of its elements (as Chief mentions, the ventilators, this information comes from Yuri Pasholok!) were openly copied from Germans (Soviets actually did copy a lot of good solutions for other tanks too – notably some muzzle brakes, they’d be crazy not to, if the enemy produces something they could use).

Probably the peak of anti-Chieftain hate was this garbage post on Russian community forums, where the author tinwoodman1 moans like a little bitch that allegedly Chieftain praises crappy American and German tanks, while Soviet junk glorious Iosef Stalin tank gets shafted.

Funnily enough, Storm intervened in the abovementioned thread:

storm1

“The tank was shitty in real life. Why should it be praised? And in general – stop fucking trolling, dear community”

Well, there you have it. Gotta love Storm getting pissed. Russians are actually very sensitive about their tech, or – more the like – about western capitalists commenting on their tech. Despite their whining, personally, I think the video was good and to the point. Looking forward to part two.

FTR Q&A – Issue 1

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“Let’s get this show on the road!”

Earlier, I was considering the following option: a kind player on RU server (thanks, Loooser78V!) would “smuggle” FTR questions in Russian into SerB’s thread, they get replied, you get them back. Overall, as you can imagine, this solution is very heavy-handed and time-consuming, not even speaking of the fact there was no guarantee SerB would answer the questions (he didn’t answer the first batch, despite my best efforts to pick those that adhered to the rules).

Well, today, another option presented itself. I was contacted (!) by Pavel Myreev, also known as Zlobny. His official title is the “game balance designer” – in layman’s terms: he is the guy responsible for vehicle balance. He offered me the following:

He (and his colleagues, where needed) would answer 20 questions per week, on weekly basis, exclusively for FTR. Yea, I didn’t believe it either, but here it is. So, here’s what’s going to happen. From comments (although, I reserve one or two questions this time for things that interest me personally) under this post, I will pick 20 questions, that get answered.

First batch is a test run of course, to see how it works, but I think it’s hell of a better deal than what EU forums have right now with Quasar. Info straight from the people, that actually matter! Needless to say, I am pretty amazed by this opportunity, as you can imagine, after the massive leaks around patch 8.5 I thought I’d be blacklisted. But, apparently I am not.

And the best part: you can ask almost anything you want (I will of course not pick the blatantly stupid or thousand-times-answered stuff – no, there will be no skill MM in randoms for example), the guys at WG RU are still willing to find out the answer, if it doesn’t fall into their category. I will also let you know which questions I picked in advance.

So, enjoy :)

- SS

Update: Thank you, I think we have enough for the first batch. Will sort this out in the morning.

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23.10.2013

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For all those interested in modelling (real life modelling, like plastic tank kits), Revell is offering its products with World of Tanks codes inside. Pretty neat.

Also, the first FTR QA test was not successful: the questions were not replied for some reason, but the player was not banned, so no rules were broken. Will run a second test.

- there is no special MM for platoons
- the D-83 gun is not planned for World of Tanks (SS: Soviet experimental gun projected for IS-3, if I recall correctly with like 380mm pen)
- Soviet “konisch” type squeezebore guns (for example the S-40 with 76-57mm) are not planned

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FCM F1 and superheavy artillery, part 1

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Source: http://wot-news.com/main/fmsg/41942/18310/35
Author: alternatehistory

Hello everyone,

this article is based on the one linked above. It’s not a direct translation and I’ve added a few things I found interesting, but almost all credits go to the author “alternatehistory” and player “Giganaut” for his 2011 FCM forum thread and the renders. The original article title was “If there was no war” and it deals with the performance of superheavy tanks, such as the F1, including the analysis how they would have really performed in battle, were they ever built

As some of you might remember, the superheavy French tank FCM F1 was something, that was planned for World of Tanks a long time ago. Hell, even the model exists:

FiiHX

Also, an official description of the ingame vehicle was leaked some time ago:

In 1936 the French government requested design entries for a new heavy breakthrough tank, which would replace the Char 2C. Five companies proposed designs, the FCM company among them. A wooden prototype was constructed by 1940; it was destroyed in 1941.

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FTR Shutdown – Aftermath

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Hello everyone,

I feel I should write something intelligent, deep and touching, so you can have a good laugh and joke about feel trips, but… somehow words don’t come to me.

When I wrote the “shutdown” post in the morning, I was in gloomy mood and what I expected in response was some trolling, some “thank you’s” and maybe like 50 bucks donhated in total from the most loyal readers. I wasn’t sure what to do next (that’s why it looked like I change my decision from day to day). Maybe that was also because I didn’t realize until today the real significance of the statistics, the meaning of the fact this site has tens of thousands of readers. When you look at it, it’s just a number – at least it was for me, until today.

Well, long story short, in a matter of hours, you guys donated over 2500 Euro. Hell, you made my Paypal account shut down, Paypal now thinks I am some kind of drug lord or something :) Needless to say, this is enough to run for months without ads – and that’s exactly what will happen now. I am impressed beyond words. There have been more than 400 separate donations and some crazy guys donated 100 Euro even. Before, I had a plan to thank every single person who donated, but holy hell, when I got home and viewed my e-mail account, I was like:

 

 

I think instead of some long speeches (well, posts) about how grateful I am to each an every one of you and instead of spending time making lists of everyone who donated, I will dedicate that time to bringing you even more news, more stuff, more articles, I think that’ll be more useful for everyone.

For the Record will continue and will upgrade in time. The first thing to come will be the QA option. As I wrote a few times before, at this very moment it’s being “beta-tested” (questions have been posted, so far no answer from developers, but that’s okay, we’ll get it to work).

It’s my turn to keep the promise and worry not – I will. I am proud to have such wonderful readers. Let’s kick it into overdrive!

With kind regards
Silentstalker

PS: Too much pathos? How terrible. Seriously, I gotta do something with that type of writing.

What’s wrong with Clanstats on Wot-News

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Source: Edrard’s wot-news post

Hello everyone,

as a reaction on the question posted on FB, whether there’s something wrong with wot-news, I am translating Edrard’s post from 19.10.2013. So, here’s what Edrard wrote about Wot-news issues:

Lately you might have noticed there are a lot of problems on the website with statistics and calculators (SS: player statistics). This is connected with the fact that Wargaming transferred the data acquiring methods (SS: the way external websites gather data from WG servers) from version 1.0 to version 2.0. And that wouldn’t be a problem, if the transfer was performed in stages – that is if they implemented the new method completely and then cancelled the old one – but, unfortunately, that did not happen. They have told us for months to transfer our services to new methods and we are currently actively working on that – the calculator, some changes in clan statistics were already reworked and new parser for server statistics was developed, but what is even more unfortunate, the new methods are not ready for permanent using, they have a lot of bugs and during peak times, they simply stop working. I’d like to add that the guys from XVM have the same issues. And all would be fine, if the old methods continued to work normally – they work fine, but Wargaming disabled them: not long ago, the clan info part stopped working and they also added limits to the simultaneous number of requests. That led to the current statistics problems, when it is for example impossible to collect server statistics and there are often issues with the services on our website.
The only thing we can do now is wait and hope that the situation will be corrected in the future.

SS: In case you were wondering – yes, this is apparently tied to some of the FTR crashes. Let’s hope Wargaming pulls its stuff together.

22.10.2013

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The 8.9 will go live on RU server on 29.10. and on EU server on 30.10.2013 (no data on NA server, sorry).

Please keep in mind that after 8.9, you will NOT be able to sell the Super Pershing for gold anymore, so if you forgot, do it now.

Storm also started asking players in a post, which maps do they like the best. Not much info from there, but it seems the most players actually prefer older maps: Malinovka, Murovanka, Prokhorovka, Himmelsdorf and others.

- Storm states that in the first test, the 7/42 skill MM was not working
- Storm also states that the skill MM uses special 7/42 battles rating, not just winrate, so it’s pointless to compare 7/42 matchmaking with XVM results
- the 7/42 skill MM is based on “general overview of player skill”
- Lowe will not be rebalanced anytime soon (SS: specifially the answer was “soon – no”, which sort of leaves an impression that there might be a rebalance coming later)
- apparently, the D-25 on IS-4 was a temporary solution and might be removed at some point (SS: unclear)

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